Joan Rivers lived in a beautiful penthouse on Manhattan’s East Side before she passed. The late comedienne quipped about her home in a documentary that, “This is how Marie Antoinette would have lived if she had money.”
Totaling more than 5, 000 square feet in space, the apartment has floor to ceiling windows, wood burning fireplaces, a parlor, a mezzanine floor and a second floor.
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Located at 1 East 62nd Street, the apartment is decorated with candelabra like light fixtures on its walls, white decorative drapes and has hardwood floors. Support beams that separate the living areas are decorated to look like Greek columns and the spacious master bath has a standalone ornate tub.
Rivers had put the apartment on the market two years ago for $29.5 million. She was the head of her building’s condo board.
Dolly Lenz of Dolly Lenz Real Estate who is marketing the penthouse told The New York Post, that “It is a palatial, magnificent, very French looking apartment with very grand proportions. It was as elegant and beautiful as she [Rivers] was.”
Located in Lennox Hill near the corner of Fifth Ave, 1 East 62nd Street is a 42 foot wide limestone mansion, designed by Horace Trumbauer, America’s great classical revivalist architect. Originally built in 1903 for John R. Drexel and his socialite wife Alice Troth Drexel, the house was converted into apartments in the 1930’s. Ernest Hemingway wrote The Snows of Kilimanjaro when he lived there.
Rivers had come a long way from the simple Brooklyn apartment building in which she grew up. The star lived with her parents and older sister in apartment 107 at the 16 story Art Deco building 135 Eastern Parkway. Built in the 1920s, it stands opposite the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens.
When Rivers was a kid her family paid a whopping $140 a month in rent there when the predominantly Jewish neighborhood was known as “Doctors’ Row.” The building went co-op in the 80s.
